Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

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Treaty Compliance	3 min 35 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Treaties of Interest	4 min 41 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
UNMOVIC	4 min 44 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Verification	5 min 02 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime

(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)

Transcript

Treaty Compliance

I’m Trevor Findlay, the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Treaty Compliance, which is a new centre at Carleton University; it’s only been in existence for a year. We are devoted to researching compliance with international agreements, treaties, UN resolutions, anything where states commit themselves to obligations. Our concern is to investigate how states are complying with their obligations in terms of submitting themselves to monitoring and verification, and what happens if states are discovered to be in non-compliance, what measures can be taken in those cases.

The theory of compliance is that states who commit themselves to obligations under treaties, arrangements or resolutions from the Security Council at the United Nations should then follow through with those commitments. In order to do that, treaties usually contain some sort of mechanism for monitoring compliance, for verifying compliance—that is, checking against the monitoring evidence and then having mechanisms of some description to allow states to make their case about why they’ve behaved in a particular sort of way and for treaty parties to then decide what action should be taken. Sometimes that action can take the form of discussions designed to induce the country to change its ways. There can be any number of types of talks, negotiations, perhaps minor incentives involved in those talks, such as diplomatic relations or improved trade relations. But at the other end of the spectrum you have the possibility of sanctions, and these could include economic sanctions, targeted sanctions against leaders of countries that have transgressed their obligations, and ultimately the use of force, which was one thing that was done, of course, in the case of Iraq. So there is a whole range of possibilities involved in the theory of compliance. Our Centre is designed to investigate both the theory and how it might pan out in practice.

The practice of compliance is very much a mixed bag. By and large, states do comply with their treaty obligations. But it’s the hard cases that present the greatest challenges, and invariably that’s wound up with all sorts of political issues that, in some cases, have nothing to do with the treaty at all. For instance, in the case of Iran, Iran is clearly in violation of its nuclear safeguards obligations, in violation of the non-proliferation treaty. But the whole question of why it is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons is bound up in the regional relationships it has with its immediate neighbours and its relationship with the United States. So the theory of compliance tends to leave out these political aspects in which the compliance issue finds itself. It’s a very complex area and one which demands a lot of expertise across fields. One aim of our Centre will be to draw a multidisciplinary group together so that various experts can look at the different aspects of compliance, because clearly it’s difficult to be an expert in economic sanctions and the use of force and international law, all of which have a huge impact on the compliance question.

Treaties of Interest

The Outer Space Treaty is an interesting one, because it was concluded during the Cold War and was really designed to prevent the placement of nuclear weapons in outer space and the militarization of celestial bodies like the moon. This was obviously during the days of the space race, so it was feared that either the United States or Russia would be putting nuclear weapons into space or actually militarizing the moon. The United States, obviously, went to the moon and there were fears that there would be a military colony, before we knew it, on the moon, and then the Soviets would follow and we would have an arms race in outer space. So that treaty was relatively basic and designed to prevent that particular threat.

What it didn’t ban was military activities in general in space. So currently there is a gap in outer-space law, with the possibility that the United States, at the very least, will militarize outer space, put conventional weaponry into space, such as weapons that can destroy satellites, for instance. There is quite a push now, by many countries, to have a new treaty or set of treaties that would address these additional gaps in outer-space law. The United States, as you can imagine, is not particularly enamoured of this because they are by far and away the great space power. They are probably the only ones at the moment that would put weaponry into space that would be effective. So there is a concern, obviously, on the part of other states—particularly those who are competitors, such as Russia and China—that the United States not be allowed to militarize space and that there be a set of rules to avoid this. So that’s one of the big issues in disarmament at the moment: to what extent an outer-space treaty can be devised to strengthen the outer-space disarmament regime.

The Inhumane Weapons Convention, again, is a rather strange treaty because it suggests that some weapons are more humane than others. But there has been a long tradition in international humanitarian law, going back to the turn of the 20th century, that there are particular weapons which most people find absolutely abhorrent and would not wish to see used in battle. Generally they are weapons that don’t have much military utility anyway, so the military don’t go to the battlements to preserve these options. They are things like dumdum bullets, which everyone has heard of—hollow-pointed bullets which create terrible wounds in the human body—they have been banned since 1898 by The Hague Convention. So there is a long tradition of doing this. But in more modern times, things like blinding laser weapons have been a concern, so there have been attempts to ban those sorts of particularly injurious weapons. Some of these have been embodied in the Inhumane Weapons Convention, also known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. These are conventional weapons, not weapons of mass destruction, but they are regarded as particularly injurious. There is an umbrella treaty, the Inhumane Weapons Convention, and then various protocols attached to that to ban particular types of weapons. So it’s a work in progress. There have been negotiations ongoing to add to the list of banned weapons.

Well, the third, rather bizarre, convention is the ENMOD Convention [Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques]. Again, it’s a product of the Cold War, when it was feared, in the days of the height of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, that either side would try to adapt the weather to cause death and destruction. Things like seeding rain clouds to cause floods in a particular country or in some way trying to use storms or triggering earthquakes—there’s a whole list of bizarre possibilities. It was felt that a treaty would be worthwhile. But again, in this case, the actual use of these weapons was so far off in the future, so unlikely, that I think both sides felt relatively safe in being able to forgo that option themselves. It was a relatively easy treaty to agree on. But it exists, and a lot of countries have signed on and become parties to it.

UNMOVIC

UNMOVIC, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, was set up to verify Iraq, to determine whether Iraq had destroyed its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It worked in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which handles the nuclear portfolio, so it was a joint effort by these two bodies. They were the ones who were in Iraq immediately before the Coalition invasion; they were asked to withdraw. They did not, as everyone now knows, discover any weapons of mass destruction, but in searching for those weapons and in attempting to document what Iraq had done, in attempting to help Iraq destroy what remnants it did have, they gained an enormous amount of experience, expertise and documentation—which is now, unfortunately, sitting in New York and raising the question, what happens now?

A study we did at the Canadian Centre for Treaty Compliance was to look at what should be done with this expertise, this cadre of trained and experienced inspectors in all these fields, trying to answer the question of what should be done in terms of retaining this expertise into the future in some shape or form. The difficulty is that because the United States is somewhat embarrassed about the failure to discover WMD in Iraq, they are opposed to letting UNMOVIC continue—they really want to wind it up. Paradoxically perhaps, the Iraqi government also wants to wind it up because the organization is funded by money that came out of the Oil for Food program. So the Iraqis see this as their money and they, of course, question why, given all their other needs in terms of development, this money should be used to support weapons inspectors in New York that currently are not permitted to enter into Iraq. There’s no point, really, in them going back there, and the Iraqis wouldn’t want them to go back. So what they are currently engaged in is a “lessons learned” exercise. They are looking at the experience that they had and trying to document it. They are doing what’s called a compendium, which will draw together all this information.

But from our Centre’s point of view, the real question is: should we somehow preserve all of this and sustain it? Because they did an excellent job in Iraq, at very short notice and with all sorts of difficult challenges put in their way, including by the Iraqis and others. Our view, after studying this, is that it is possible to retain parts of this organization and its expertise into the future. But it would require the Security Council to agree to do this. The body was set up by the Council, and only the Council can wind it up or divert its resources elsewhere. And currently there is no consensus in the Council to do that. Some Council members do want it to be retained—the French want it, the British want it, the Russians want it to at least do a summary report on its findings, probably in order to embarrass the United States. But the Council is split, so at the moment there is no movement on this question. UNMOVIC is sitting in New York, it’s going through this lessons learned exercise and it’s continuing to train inspectors. In fact, our Centre was involved in helping train inspectors through an exercise at the petrochemical complexes in Sarnia.

So the mechanism is there, and our argument is that it could be used for future situations, either like Iraq, which is very large scale, or for much lesser contingencies, where perhaps there is a suspicion of the use of chemical weapons and a country is not party to the Chemical Weapons treaty so it’s not subject to those verification provisions, but nonetheless the Council and Secretary-General want to find out what’s going on. This mechanism would be available for those sorts of operations. Plus, it could be used for biological weapons verification. As I’ve said, there is no such mechanism under the treaty for that. So this mechanism would have biological weapons-related expertise, which they used in Iraq, and that could be used for other cases.

Verification

The major concerns about WMD and compliance are really related to particular regions. By and large, most countries comply with their obligations in respect of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which are the three major types of weapons of mass destruction. So we are talking about a very small number of states, and there tends to be problems within regions: the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia. They tend to be the regions where states either aren’t parties to particular agreements—they’ve never signed or they’ve signed but never ratified, so they’re not full parties—or they have violated their obligations, or there is some suspicious evidence about their obligations. There is a range of possibilities there, but it tends to be, if you look at a map of the world, in the Middle East, in East Asia and in South Asia. For instance, India and Pakistan is a problem because India and Pakistan have never become parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and they both have nuclear weapons. But the whole situation is unregulated. So in effect there is very little compliance there, because there is very little in the way of controls and regulations in the first place. In the case of East Asia, it’s quite a different situation there because North Korea has violated its obligations. It did sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is meant to be abiding by those obligations and with its safeguards agreements. So there is a case where a country has joined a treaty, has violated its obligations and now purports to have withdrawn from the treaty. Of course, we are concerned to get North Korea back into compliance. That has implications for that entire region, because Japan in theory has enough nuclear material and wherewithal to produce a bomb relatively quickly. Japan is in good standing in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, so the last thing we would want would be some sort of cascade of non-compliance in that region.

So the problems tend to be regional and the problems tend to involve countries trying to acquire all types of weapons of mass destruction. There is a tendency for a state that wants nuclear weapons to also be suspected of acquiring chemical and biological weapons, as is the case with North Korea, as was the case with Iraq. It’s suspected that Iran might have chemical weapons, even though the main focus has been on nuclear weapons. Syria is suspected of having chemical and biological weapons. So there are regions and there are particular states which are viewed as being of compliance concern.

In relation to weapons of mass destruction, there are several very elaborate global verification systems. There is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards system, which applies to every country that has signed and ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They have recently been boosted since it was discovered that Iraq came close to nuclear weapons, so we now have a strengthened safeguards system, and that again is meant to apply universally. We also have a very sophisticated verification system for the Chemical Weapons Convention—that’s located in The Hague, in the Netherlands. That is a system which is meant to check countries’ compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans all chemical weapons. It verifies not only that states have destroyed their existing stockpiles, but also that they’re not producing new stockpiles from their purportedly peaceful chemical industry. It’s a global undertaking, it’s very sophisticated and it’s still being developed. The treaty is relatively new. Then we have a system for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bans nuclear tests in all environments. That again has a global verification system, which is designed to detect nuclear tests underground, in the atmosphere and underwater. There is a global network of monitoring stations hosted by a huge number of countries, including Canada. That information is fed into the international monitoring system headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and is designed to detect any nuclear test down to a very low level, probably one kilotonne.

The big gap in verification is for biological weapons. There is no verification system for the Biological Weapons Convention, unfortunately. The parties to the treaty spent about 15 years trying to design one, but the United States decided, a couple of years ago, that it wasn’t interested in verification, and the negotiations ground to a halt. Currently there is no system for checking; it’s one of the issues plaguing the Biological Weapons Convention at the moment. Canada is pressing for a verification system, but at the moment the attitude of the Bush administration is that they are not interested in such a system.

Last Updated:2006-10-16

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